BREAKING – Reuters: “Senator Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a key player in fiscal cliff talks, told a newspaper in his home state of Montana that he wants to preserve the estate tax break, which is important for farmers who want to pass down land worth millions of dollars to their children. Baucus also said he hopes to preserve the production tax credit for wind energy, he told the Great Falls Tribune.”

JUST KIDDING! SO MUCH FOR DEM OUTRAGE ON OUTSIDE MONEY -- “Democratic super PACs get jump on 2014, 2016,” by Kenneth P. Vogel and Tarini Parti: “Winning changes everything. It took Democrats a while to warm up to super PACs, but … they’re already busy at work courting their wealthiest supporters and planning even more ambitious efforts for future elections. Shortly after Election Day, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and top White House aides spoke at a three-day secret meeting of major Democratic donors and officials … gearing up for 2014 … Among the groups represented: Priorities USA Action, the [pro-Obama] super PAC … ; American Bridge, the oppo shop that helped sink Todd Akin; the Pelosi-backed House Majority PAC; the secret-money organizing non-profit America Votes; and the pro-choice group EMILY’s List. Some of those groups or their allies are considering expanding into state politics, policy fights or even primaries on both sides. And they have already gone back to their 2012 donors to ask for more cash while the euphoria from winning is still fresh. Their goal: a permanent network of officially blessed independent groups that leverages liberals’ increasing acceptance and appreciation of outside money …

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“The three-day conference — the annual winter conference of the Democracy Alliance, an exclusive club comprised of some of the biggest liberal donors — at Washington’s W Hotel featured presentations by top Obama campaign and administration officials including Mitch Stewart, Matthew Barzum, Gene Sperling and Jon Carson. Democracy Alliance donors donated or pledged more than $14 million to super PACs and secret-money nonprofits this year after a vigorous debate about whether Democrats should participate in the wave of unlimited political spending that Republicans rode to control of the House of Representatives in 2010. … Democrats need to balance distaste for big money politics with pragmatism, said Rodell Mollineau, president of American Bridge, a super PAC and non-profit that combined to spend $15 million in 2012 circulating damaging information on GOP candidates … Pelosi and Schumer thanked the donors for their support …

“Priorities USA Action, which was represented at the Democracy Alliance conference by co-founder Bill Burton and pollster Geoff Garin, reported spending $65 million attacking Romney. … ‘We’re not going to go away,’ [said Paul] Begala [who helped Priorities]. ‘Democrats have had a tendency to reinvent the wheel every cycle. And one of the reasons the president won is that he built a spectacular campaign apparatus in 2008 and improved and built on it in 2012. We’re likely to follow his example.’” http://politi.co/So8hJA

STORM BREWING FOR OUTSIDE GROUPS? L.A. Times 1-col. lead, “States press groups to list donors: Nonprofits that gave millions to influence campaigns in the election are being ordered to disclose financial contributors,” by Matea Gold and Chris Megerian: “Tax-exempt advocacy groups that played an aggressive role in this year’s election are coming under increasing scrutiny from state regulators, who are cracking down on organizations seeking to engage in campaigns without revealing their financial backers. The pressure in states with stringent campaign finance rules contrasts sharply with the federal level, where nonprofits that spent hundreds of millions of dollars to influence races this year have not been required to disclose their donors.

“This month, California’s Fair Political Practices Commission forced an Arizona-based group to reveal the source of $11 million it gave for two ballot initiative campaigns. The funds were traced to a Virginia nonprofit that also does not reveal its donors. That hasn’t satisfied the commission, which has begun an investigation to uncover the original source. Shortly before election day, judges in Idaho and Montana required the disclosure of contributors to two nonprofit organizations that had drawn the attention of state regulators with their political activity. ‘Frankly, if we didn’t take a stand on this, we might as well just pack up our campaign disclosure law and send it away,’ said Idaho Secretary of State Ben Ysursa.” Not online yet

SPOTTED, in “Skyfall”: Wolf Blitzer, delivering a “Breaking News” update seen by a bleary Bond at a bar in an exotic location, reporting a possible cyberterror attack on London headquarters of MI6, the British Secret Service.

2016 WATCH – WashPost A1, “The secretary of 1,000 things: What Hillary Clinton’s choices say about her future,” by Stephanie McCrummen: “Of all the things that Clinton’s friends say about her, opinions bend toward two essential facets of her character. The first is that in the time they have known her — as a student leader in the 1960s, as a first lady, as a U.S. senator or now — Clinton has not really changed except to become more of the person she has always been: a deeply optimistic Methodist who believes that government can advance human progress and a hopeless wonk who knows her yurts from her gers. The second is that while Clinton is a famously shrewd political operator, she is never more energized or relentless as when she is pursuing a cause that she believes will improve people’s lives, however incrementally. This has often been Clinton’s most polarizing quality. It is what her detractors have at times interpreted as self-righteousness and a precursor to classic big-government liberalism. It is what her admirers have viewed as the doggedly pragmatic, in-the-trenches quality that makes Clinton an almost heroic, if also at times tragic, figure. …

“At the State Department, Clinton has used her power to create an array of new offices and positions devoted to long-standing causes: for civil society and emerging democracies; for global youth issues; and for the one for which she is most often noted, global women’s issues. She is widely credited with changing how the department thinks about women. … While Clinton’s initiatives have not led to major foreign policy shifts, they have resulted in project after project. … Clinton has cast her choices as a response to a changing world where power and threats are more diffuse, requiring the United States to pay more attention to jobless youths in North Africa and grinding poverty across the globe. … A more personal explanation for Clinton’s choices relates to her own struggle to be understood, … Another has to do with the faith she has embraced since she was a girl. … [T]he answer to the question of whether Hillary Clinton will run for president in 2016 — whether she will seek the job with the most power to do the most good of all — is another question: whether she can keep herself from it.” http://wapo.st/V85J6M

** A message from MyWireless.org: Senators can give the perfect gift that every American wireless consumer would like. The Wireless Tax Fairness Act provides relief to consumers by putting a freeze on discriminatory state and local wireless taxes and fees. Senators, Pass the Wireless Tax Fairness Act this Congress! **

CLIFF NOTES – ALBERT R. HUNT, “Lincoln’s Master Class in Politics”: “It’s the best movie about Washington politics I’ve seen. … [I]t brilliantly captures him doing what politicians are supposed to do, and today too often avoid: compromising, calculating, horse trading, dealing and preventing the perfect from becoming the enemy of a good objective. … [T]hen as now, the drama is about choices with consequences: a re-elected Lincoln decides to push the anti-slavery amendment at the risk of prolonging the Civil War. There are compelling figures: William Seward, his secretary of state and shrewd political confidant; Thaddeus Stevens, the fiery abolitionist who tempers his principles to achieve the legislative goal, and craven and cowardly congressmen. … To persuade some, Lincoln appeals to their nobler instincts about the evils of racial hatred. With others, he does what’s necessary. With the outcome in the balance, a trio of fixers brought in to help is told: ‘You will procure me the votes.’ …

“On the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, Obama starts with a strong hand. … With some fits and starts, odds are that in the next several weeks the White House and Congress will get a short-term deal to avoid the Jan. 1 deadline that would trigger across-the- board tax increases and automatic spending cuts. Much more problematic next year is reaching a grand bargain that provides a short-term stimulus and addresses long-term chronic deficits. There would have to be concessions, tradeoffs and favors bestowed for votes. Politicians might look to 1865 as a model for this uphill quest.” http://bloom.bg/TYTAuc

THE NARRATIVE – “'Fiscal cliff' talks stalled but progress possible,” by Reuters’ Jason Lange: "Democratic and Republican lawmakers have been trying to convince the public -- and financial markets -- that they are willing to compromise and can reach a deal before the end of the year. [Sen. Dick] Durbin indicated [on ABC’s ‘This Week’ that] Democrats might accept a reform of the government's Medicare health insurance program for the elderly that would make higher-income seniors pay more for their care. Democrats traditionally oppose limiting Medicare benefits according to income, a practice known as ‘means testing.’ Durbin said Medicaid, a public health insurance program for the poor, also could be overhauled. But Durbin said Social Security, the federal government pension program, needs only small tweaks to ensure long-term solvency rather than major reforms. …

“Republican Senator Bob Corker said both sides need to show ‘political courage’ and reach a bigger $4 trillion deficit reduction deal that includes both increases in revenues and cuts in spending by the end of the year. … A growing group of Republican lawmakers are loosening their ties to Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist famous for getting elected officials to sign a pledge that they will vote against any tax increases.”

THE 113TH CONGRESS – Lead “Talk of the Town” item in New Yorker – “Mandate with Destiny,” by Hendrik Hertzberg: “For one party to win a majority of House seats with a minority of votes is a relatively rare occurrence. It has now happened five times in the past hundred years. In 1914 and 1942, the Democrats were the beneficiaries. In 1952, 1996, and this year, it was the Republicans’ turn to get lucky, and their luck is likely to hold for many election cycles to come. Gerrymandering routinely gets blamed for such mismatches, but that’s only part of the story. Far more important than redistricting is just plain districting: because so many Democrats are city folk, large numbers of Democratic votes pile up redundantly in overwhelmingly one-sided districts. Even having district lines drawn by neutral commissions instead of by self-serving politicians wouldn’t do much to alter this built-in structural bias. …

“Before November 6th, there was much speculation that Obama, like Bush in 2000, might lose the popular vote while winning in the electoral college. It didn’t happen, but the speculation was far from idle. If Romney had run more strongly throughout the country, he might have beaten Obama by as many as two million votes and still have lost the Presidency. Even so, the reëlection of a Republican House was no more a repudiation of, for example, levying modestly higher taxes on the highest incomes than was the reëlection of the President or the strengthening of the Democratic majority in the Senate. ‘You know what? It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires,’ William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, a kind of Human Events for non-dummies, mused the other day on Fox News, of all places. Similar heresies are beginning to be whispered on Capitol Hill. But, given the track record of the past four years, it would be unwise to bet the farm on the proposition that the G.O.P. will edge away from nihilist obstructionism anytime soon. Stage 5, ‘Acceptance,’ is still a few Republicans shy of a quorum.” http://nyr.kr/Tg5rVO

“HOUSE DEMS FACE UPHILL SLOG IN 2014,” by Alex Isenstadt: “Nancy Pelosi decided to take one more crack at winning back the House, but a big obstacle stands between the Democratic leader and the speaker’s gavel in 2014: the six-year itch. … The party controlling the White House during a president’s sixth year in office has lost seats in every midterm election but one since 1918 … The exception was 1998, when a soaring economy and Republicans’ focus on President Clinton’s affair helped Democrats buck the trend and pick up a handful of seats. … It happened to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938 when voters recoiled at his New Deal reforms. … And in 2006, George W. Bush, presiding over two drawn-out wars in the Middle East, watched Republicans lose 30 seats and control of the House. …

“Democrats say the fact that Republicans control the House will make it harder for the GOP to turn the midterms into a pure referendum on the party holding the White House. And, some Democrats argue, after voters took out their aggression on the party in the 2010 red wave, there’s less of an appetite to do it again in 2014. ‘If voters had a six-year itch, they scratched it in 2010,’ said Jesse Ferguson, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee deputy executive director.” http://politi.co/Yize6O

--NATE SILVER, “Democrats Unlikely to Regain House in 2014”: “In midterm election years since World War II, the president's party has lost an average of 26 seats in the House … The president's party gained seats only twice, in 1998 and 2002. … [W]hat we observe in the data … is a ‘reverse coattails’ effect. When a party wins the presidency by a large margin, it usually benefits from voters who are mainly interested in the presidential election itself, and then vote for the same party in races down the ballot. These types of voters may not show up to vote in midterm years. Thus, the more a party benefits from presidential coattails in the presidential election year, the more it stands to lose two years later. … Midterm losses for the president's party have been somewhat more modest in recent years than during the middle part of the 20th century. This potentially reflects the fact that more Congressional districts have strongly partisan makeups now, leaving fewer seats in play. As 2010 demonstrated, however, no firewall is all that robust in the event of a wave election year.

“That Mr. Obama won the presidency by a relatively narrow margin this year and that Democrats do not control the House would argue against a wave election … This year, there were only 11 House seats that Democrats lost by five or fewer percentage points. Thus, even if they had performed five points better across the board, they would still have come up … short of controlling the chamber. In other words, Democrats would have to perform quite a bit better in House races in 2014 than they did in 2012 to win control of the chamber … And … Democrats … have become increasingly reliant upon voters, like Hispanics and those under the age of 30, who do not turn out reliably in midterm election years. Democrats have a broader coalition than Republicans do in high-turnout environments, so perhaps this will benefit them in 2016. But these are not the voters you would want to depend upon to make gains in midterm election years, when turnout is much lower. “ http://nyti.ms/TdMmDp

SPORTS BLINK – COLLEGE FOOTBALL – “Top 25 ballot breakdown: Notre Dame is 1 and waiting for SEC to play out,” by AP College Football Writer Ralph D. Russo: “Ten Top 25 teams lost this weekend, the most since Oct. 11, 2003, but for the most part the national championship race was unchanged. No. 2 Alabama and No. 3 Georgia, both easy winners in rivalry games Saturday, held their spots in the rankings and in the BCS standings. They will play for the SEC title in Atlanta next weekend. The winner is a lock to move on to Miami for the BCS championship game on Jan. 7, trying to extend the Southeastern Conference's string of six straight titles. But will the right SEC team be getting a shot? Florida coach Will Muschamp doesn't think so. … He's got a point. The Gators (11-1) checked in at No. 4 in the AP poll … Their lone loss was to Georgia … But … the Gators have clearly played a tougher schedule than the Bulldogs. The Sagarin computer ratings have Florida's strength of schedule at 13th in the nation. Georgia's is 42nd. Alabama's is 39 th.”

DESSERT – “'Twilight', 'Skyfall' Help Push Holiday Box Office to Record,” by Bloomberg’s Rob Golum and Ehren Goossens: “‘The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 2,’ the finale in the teen vampire series, kept the top spot in U.S. and Canadian cinemas over Thanksgiving weekend, driving sales to a record for the five-day period. The last of the five films from Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. collected $64 million over the long weekend starting Nov. 21, Hollywood.com Box-Office said … [T]he James Bond film ‘Skyfall’ collected $36 million to place second in its third weekend for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and Sony Corp. With $686 million in worldwide sales as of Nov. 21, the picture has already become the best-performing film in the long-running secret agent series, according to Box Office Mojo. … ‘Lincoln,’ Steven Spielberg's examination of the 16th U.S. president's political campaign to end slavery, was third with $25 million in its second weekend in nationwide release. The film was produced by the director's DreamWorks Studios and is being distributed by Walt Disney Co.”

WELCOME TO THE WORLD – three young Democrats:

--Claudia Moser Chaudhary, born to Arun Chaudhary (Revolution Messaging) and Laura Moser Chaudhary, 5:19 p.m. on Saturday: “She is 9 lbs., 1 oz., and we are taking out a serious insurance policy on her hair. I know hair, and this looks good.”

--Max Phillips, born to Macon Phillips (director of White House Office of Digital Strategy) and Emily Price Phillips, on Wednesday. Macon, Emily and Max spent Thanksgiving at GWU Hospital: "Cold cut turkey sandwiches with my wife and son in a hospital room and I've never been more thankful.”

WEEKEND WEDDING (fixes typo in list): Ed Mullen -- former Boehnerlander and NRCC research director, and now partner of the Georgetown Group -- married Erin Book of Williams & Jensen yesterday at Trinity Episcopal Church in Easton, Md. The reception was at The Tidewater Inn, which Erin's father once managed. Guests included Elliot and Lindsay Berke, Geoff Embler (NRCC) and Betsy Embler (Boehner), Jonathan and Lauren Grella, Mark and Noelle Williams, Ken and Emily Spain, Bob Honold, Chad Scarborough, John Neumann, Matt and Mary Sumpter Lapinski, Whitney Drew and Amos Snead, Pete and Burson Snyder, Matt and Molly Haase, Kevin and Kara Smith, Tom Dunn, Josh and Robin Shultz with their beautiful newborn daughter, Matt Lira and Cheryl Jaeger of Leader Cantor's office, Emily Porter and Don Seymour with the Speaker's staff, and many more.

** A message from MyWireless.org: Senators can give the perfect gift that every American wireless consumer would like, and it doesn’t cost a thing!

Wireless users are paying on average more than 17% a month in wireless taxes and fees. That’s more than double the average sales tax rate of 7%. The Wireless Tax Fairness Act (Wyden - Snowe, S.543) provides financial relief to consumers by putting a five year freeze on new and discriminatory state and local wireless taxes and fees. The House passed it with overwhelming bipartisan support. Now the Senate can put a bow on it.

****** A message from UnitedHealth Group: What does it take to create a modern, high-performing, simpler health care system? Expanding access to care through proven state-based coverage and employer-sponsored insurance. Making health care more affordable with consumer-directed care and value-based payments. Supporting and modernizing Medicare to meet the complex health challenges of America’s seniors. And reinvesting in health to support research and innovation. Learn more about these ideas at http://www.unitedhealthgroup.com ******

Authors:

About The Author

Mike Allen is the chief White House correspondent for POLITICO. He comes to us from Time magazine where he was their White House correspondent. Prior to that, Allen spent six years at The Washington Post, where he covered President Bush's first term, Capitol Hill, campaign finance, and the Bush, Gore and Bradley campaigns of 2000. Before turning to national politics, he covered schools and local governments in rural counties outside Fredericksburg, Va., for The Free Lance-Star, then wrote about Doug Wilder, Oliver North, Chuck Robb and the Bobbitts for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, where he nurtured police sources on overnight ride-alongs through housing projects. Allen also covered Mayor Giuliani, the Connecticut statehouse and the wacky rich of Greenwich for The New York Times. Before moving to The Times, he did stints in the Richmond and Alexandria bureaus of The Washington Post. Allen grew up in Orange County, Calif., and has a B.A. from Washington and Lee University, where he majored in politics and journalism.